What On Earth Is Dark Scavenger?

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One of my favourite jokes is making up genres. Generally I pick two or three that seem unlikely to work together, inevitably beginning with “turn-based”, because it’s the unlikeliest approach to many other types. Which makes the description of Dark Scavenger, announced today by Psydra Games, beyond intriguing. They’re calling it a turn-based combat point-and-click adventure. Wuh?

“Players fill the role of a powerful space traveler, guiding the character through hundreds of dramatic scenarios using a dynamic text-based encounter system.”

Thing is with text adventure games, they tend to punish you very hard for very little reason but developer’s evilness and randomness.
You walked 5 meters east? Ha! There was a fiery abyss of death and you died. Restart the game?

I get it. It’s a cross between a JRPG and a Fighting Fantasy / Lone Wolf style adventure book. Clever, if slightly goofy-looking.

(Specifically, it’s not like a proper IF-style text adventure because you’re choosing branching options rather than typing in commands. And also not like a classic graphic adventure because you’re choosing pre-set branching options instead of VERBing NOUNs.)

I don’t really know what to think of this game. It looks strangely intriguing like an old game from a company such as Cryo or Silmarils but at the same time it looks a bit of a naff mishmash of hodge podges.

I watched the trailer earlier this day. And I thought: Woar. It’s Zork. Just with strange artworks. And with less interaction. And with bad sound. And with even more strange characters. And with… oh wait. It’s not Zork. It’s just some strange game announced in the wrong century. I really love indie-games. But this one looks like… uhm… no.

This doesn’t look a lot of fun. But I always found it a little odd that there haven’t been more games merging adventure puzzles and RPG combat, kind of like the Penny Arcade games, only with more adventure and less tedious combat. Every time I go back to Dreamfall, and being thoroughly mystified by it’s bizarre interaction system. It’s like, “why couldn’t I just use the mouse?”

Give me a story/puzzles in the TLJ world, with the immersive thrill of direct movement control and 3D that Dreamfall had, only let me interact with the world using the mouse like WoW, and give me the tactical combat of something like Dragon Age: Origins. It’d be the best game ever.